What man can you show me who places any value on his time, who reckons the worth of each day, who understands that he is dying daily? For we are mistaken when we look forward to death; the major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years behind us are in death’s hands. …

Nothing is ours except time. We were entrusted by nature with ownership of this single thing, so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession. What fools the mortals be! They allow the cheapest and most useless things, which can easily be replaced, to be charged in the reckoning, after they have acquired them; but they never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity, – time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.”

Imagine there is a bank that credits your account each morning with $86,400, carries over no balance from day to day, allows you to keep no cash balance, and every evening cancels whatever part of the amount you had failed to use during the day.

What would you do?

Draw out every cent, of course!

Well, everyone has such a bank. Its name is time. Every morning, it credits you with 86,400 seconds.

Every night it writes off, as lost, whatever of this you have failed to invest to good purpose.

It carries over no balance. It allows no overdraft.

Each day it opens a new account for you.

Each night it burns the records of the day.

If you fail to use the day’s deposits, the loss is yours.

There is no going back. There is no drawing against tomorrow.

You must live in the present on today’s deposits.

Invest it so as to get from it the utmost in health, happiness and success.”

All other good gifts depend on time for their value. What are friends, books, or health, the interest of travel or the delights of home, if we have not time for their enjoyment? Time is often said to be money, but it is more – it is life; and yet many who would cling desperately to life, think nothing of wasting time.”

We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved will die, too, sometimes – heartbreakingly – before us… Busyness numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down.”